No Evidence for Far Transfer in Cognitive Training
Dr. Job Fransen
Job Fransen is a skill acquisition specialist working at the University Medical Centre Groningen in the Netherlands and an adjunct fellow at the University of Technology Sydney’s School of Sport, Exercise, and Rehabilitation. His research focuses on optimizing skill acquisition in athletes. He has worked with high-performance athletes and individuals from around the world, across elite sport, esports and gaming, and the military. Job is also a skill acquisition consultant, assisting some of the world’s best coaches to design practice that optimizes learning across a range of sports, most notably rugby, Australian football, soccer, and basketball.
We discovered Job's work because of a preprint article he released that provides extensively resourced evidence to argue two main points:
A far transfer of skills is something we all think we do yet it is very difficult to achieve. Instead, we mostly achieve near transfers of skills between very similar or related tasks.
Cognitive training is evidenced not to have a far transfer in robust scientific research in psychology, yet numerous tech companies claim to have the ‘next best cognitive or perceptual training tool’ for improving sports performance while these transfers are exceptionally difficult to achieve and there is no evidence these tools can even achieve them.
In this episode, we start off by defining the concepts of "near transfer" and "far transfer" and then set off on a wide-ranging conversation about how to better deliver actual evidence-based cognitive training. We address the heated debate among researchers in this space, critique some of the popular technologies, and arrive at some pretty valuable insights on how to integrate skill acquisition principles into the ways we train, such as the optimal challenge point model.
If this is a topic that excites you, you're in luck. Both ahead of and during our conversation Job pointed us toward a wealth of resources. We'll include links to numerous references below, but if you want to contact Job directly he is very open to that. You can email him at Job.Fransen@gmail.com or reach him on his LinkedIn.
References:
A critical systematic review of the Neurotracker perceptual-cognitive training tool
Near and Far Transfer in Cognitive Training: A Second-Order Meta-Analysis
Do “Brain-Training” Programs Work?
Business leaders praised Lumosity's success then just two years later Lumosity settles for millions and admits lack of evidence for their claims